Post navigation

“One of the central bankers present asked: ‘What’s going on in Australia?’ to which the research economist replied: ‘We’ve given up thinking about Australia. There is no economic rationale for it’,” he said in a Deloitte roundtable on the Australian mortgage industry.

As one MB poster puts it…

The worlds most overvalued banks
The worlds most overvalued houses
The worlds most overvalued currency
The worlds most over rated (AAA) government
(one of) The worlds largest private debt issue (s)
The worlds largest financial system exposure to mortgages
The worlds largest per capita migration intake
The worlds most profoundly uncompetitive exposed sector
The worlds most concentrated media
The worlds most spectacularly financially non viable and indebted media
The words most deliberately specious politicians when it comes to doing anything about the above

“For Sydney, the numbers are just amazing,” said Diaswati Mardiasmo, PRD Nationwide’s national research manager. “If you have $1 million you can afford 49 per cent of Sydney but if you cut it down in half to $550,000, you can only afford 5.4-10 per cent. That’s a massive drop in terms of affordability”…

So we have the second most overpriced property in the world, and apparently the solution is to force younger generations to speculate on property using their retirement savings.

Nothing short of outright parasitic behaviour by a generation of self-entitled baby boomers, every economist and economic commentator has denounced the proposal. But now, PWC have some some analysis to conclude this will also blow a massive $31Bn hole in the federal budget by the year 2050.

The loss to government – which taxes earnings on super balances at 15 per cent – would be $1.1 billion in 2016-17, and fluctuate between $611 million and $993 million over the next nine years. By 2049-50, the figure would hit $2.1 billion, taking the accumulated hit to government to $31 billion, according to the estimate.

Such blatant outright corruption, at the highest level of politics in Australia.

Imposing fees on foreign property purchases, which will be used to fund more strict monitoring of said purchases, and civil penalties for breaking the now completely unenforced and massively abused laws.

The Property Country of Australia hates the new laws, which is a big stamp of approval. Cautiously optimistic, let’s see where this takes us in 2015 and whether this halts the Sydney bubble.

Most businesses in Australia would greatly benefit from a tax shift to economic rents with a commensurate reduction in company tax and the abolition of inefficient taxes such as stamp duties and insurance taxes.

Vast sums of money that are currently directed towards rent seeking would be redirected into productive activity, generating employment and diversifying the economy. Boom and bust property cycles would be flattened due to reduced speculation and, as a result, the broader scale ups and downs of the business cycle would be somewhat moderated.

They’ve already ensured Australia is the most unaffordably expensive country to live in, with the world’s biggest housing bubble – despite having the lowest population density of any country on Earth, and now this? What a bunch of corrupt scumbags! They will not stop until they bleed us all dry..

They emerged as a budget measure, but they won’t save the tax-payer money in any real sense.

A fundamental feature of HECS is that the Government forwards all the money upfront to the University. So if fees go up by more than the cuts, the Commonwealth shells out more from day one. Default will rise. More students will work overseas – legitimately, this is not evasion – and so only through some arcane aspect of accounting standards can this even look as if it is a savings measure.

This isn’t a savings measure: it is ideology in search of a problem.

But it gets worse. Bizarrely there is no guarantee that a single cent of the extra money will go into the student’s course: it could go into research, infrastructure, paying for past follies or current cock-ups. It’s tempting, believe me, I make them too, but it’s wrong.

The internal equity aspect of the policy design is laughable: why should the second poorest quartile of students subsidise the lowest quartile?